


In the New Air

by SevenBetter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Allusions to PTSD, American soldier Ben, Bittersweet, F/M, Factory worker Rey, Late 1940s Chicago, Post-WWII, Soft and quiet and entirely unassuming, Unorthodox relationship, Vignettes from an alternate unverse, What must it be like simply to let yourself exist in the orbit of another
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:00:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25617004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SevenBetter/pseuds/SevenBetter
Summary: With horrors seen and survived, one cannot simply pick up their life where it left off.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35





	In the New Air

Title taken from [Mimi White's poem, "The Quiet."](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=40298)

\-------

When Ben slides the key across the weathered wooden table, Rey hears the metallic drag and lowers the book held in front of her face.

She raises her eyebrows. Watches him bite the inside of his lower lip. She stares at the key for a moment, then looks up at him and cocks her head, puzzled. 

He glances briefly down at it, where it rests next to their cups of coffee, then back at her, and nods. 

Still confused, Rey doesn't put it onto her key ring. Instead, Ben watches as she slips it into the coin purse hiding inside her handbag.

He takes a long sip of from his cup, not a hint of cream or sugar to be found anywhere within its obsidian depths, and Rey grins into her own cup, the color practically khaki and sweeter than a cloud of cotton candy.

They've always been opposites, in all things. It was their opposition that brought them together, initially. The curiosity borne of discovering someone so different from yourself. 

Rey still remembers seeing him in the dockside bar, the place all the soldiers went their last night before they shipped out, beer sloshing out of his mug and onto the uniform of another man with dark hair, albeit shorter and smaller. The way Ben grinned after the spill told her they must be friends.

What a surprise it was, to discover his hot temper, the way he has been spoiled, compared to the cool calm that a lifetime of neglect had given her. 

That cool calm came in handy when she took a second job as a nurse's aide, tending to the wounded, shattered men returning from Europe and Japan and North Africa. The things she saw were so crushing, the men's suffering so disturbing, that she couldn't imagine ever getting close to someone again. Ever letting herself care deeply for someone who might end up in pain, who might wind up dying.

Yet she couldn't stay away. Neither could he. 

Not when they sighted each other in that same dockside bar, the clamor of healthy, whole men who had returned eager to drink and carouse and feel safe again. 

This time Rey was seated at a table instead of waitressing, desperate to feel the ghost of her former life, before the war ruined everything she had been hoping for. 

He was separate from the big group of soldiers, staring into his drink, seemingly yearning for a ghost of his own.

Perhaps they found those ghosts in each other. 

Which is why five years later, her hands pocked with scars from the factory and his gaze haunted with the whisper of dozens of enemies dead by his hand, they sit at the same table.

But still on opposite sides.

Rey finishes her coffee, the grit of some undissolved sugar clinging to the side of the cup, and lowers it with a gentle clatter back into its saucer. She slides her bookmark into place, which is the tipoff to him that she's ready to move on with her afternoon. In response he snaps his book shut, no bookmark, no dog-eared page.

Rey remembers him insisting, years ago, that he didn't need any of that. He could always remember which page he was on. Yet, on occasion, she catches him surreptitiously flipping around, trying to find where he left off.

She never says anything about it.

Moreover, she never says anything about anything, and neither does he. She can't pinpoint exactly when they stopped speaking to each other.

It was maybe a year after VE Day, if she had to guess. Their conversations always became consumed by the war, by the trauma they'd both suffered, exhuming demons they were both eager to forget.

They realized, at some point, that they enjoyed each other's company a lot more in silence. 

And so the silence took over. It was the third person at the table, whenever they came to Ben's favorite diner on Jefferson Street with the perfect over-medium eggs and green vinyl booths.

The silence is there when he sits outside the factory in his Studebaker, waiting for her to finish her Saturday shift so he can drive her back into the city. The buses don't run past noon on weekends. 

The only sound on those drives, of course, is the rumble of the engine and occasionally the drone of the radio, if Ben can find something good. He loves Leadbelly's song Goodnight Irene, and hates The Weavers' version, which means it's not too often the radio plays something he'll like.

Just the drone of the engine, then. 

The silence is there when they lie awake in the early morning in Rey's tiny room, squashed into her small bed but content as long as it's quiet. It's not too often she manages to sneak him into her room at the boarding house, so they relish it when she can.

He stays in her bed as long as possible. The latest was three AM. Then he drives home, parks halfway down the block, and creeps back into his bedroom before his uncle can notice he was gone. 

Not that he would give Ben any hell over it, though. Rey's seen Luke, met him once, on accident. Rey knows he and Ben developed a contentious relationship during Ben's military training, and she suspects Luke will let a lot of things slide if it helps him keep the peace between them.

After sliding his book into the inner pocket of his jacket, Ben leaves a quarter as a tip. She wonders sometimes if he was always this generous.

He slides a hand to her lower back as they exit the diner, and one glance from her is all it takes for him to pull his hand up to mid-height instead. 

After they're in the car, the weekend afternoon clamor all around them on the sidewalk and in the parking lot, he hands her the tiniest slip of paper, no bigger than a ration stamp. In his tight, messy scrawl it reads in pencil,  
  
_18 Cecil Avenue, Apartment 3._  
  
Slowly, the purpose of the key dawns on her. And just as slowly, a smile spreads over her face.   
  
He smiles back, seeming pleased just to have pleased her, and he turns the key in the ignition.  
  
Except for the moments he has to reach forward to shift gears, his hand remains on the No Man's Land in the middle of the bench seat, where her hand also lays. Even through the fabric of her gloves he can feel the heat of her skin.

The melancholy overtakes them sometimes. Bitter and drugging, leaving the other to stare helplessly, grasping for something they could do. Cringing away from the things they could say. Those are all inadequate.

Rarely are they haunted by malaise in the same moments. But on the occasion it does occur, they become the ghosts themselves, drifting in the same space, without even their wordless connection to bind them. Slowly Ben or Rey will emerge, catching the other's eye cautiously, reaching out with a tentative touch and gazes that speak for themselves. They limp under the weight of dragging them both away from their own memories, but it always works.

They always come back to each other. 

The next week, he nearly jumps to hear her call out goodbye, loudly and on a laugh, to her coworker as she approaches his car. The other woman is twenty feet off, her hair wrapped up in a pink silk scarf.

Rey meanwhile has her coveralls tied at her waist and a yellow gingham blouse on. The edge of the sleeve is fraying, he notices, as her shoulder is the first thing to enter the car.

He replays her farewell in his mind, letting it echo around, and wonders, for the first time, how much she talks at work.

He meets her eye and smiles. She returns it, then points over her shoulder out the window. "Rose," she says simply, grin lingering with contentment, and he nods, pleased for her.

He gently cups his hand around the nape of her neck for the remainder of the dusty, quiet drive.

They even make love quietly. The very second their bed is moved into the new apartment on Cecil they spend a bright, sweaty afternoon making it their own again, Rey's slip shoved up around her wast because they could scarcely wait to have each other. Harsh breaths and the occasional whimper are all that fill the room, and when they lay in the afterglow, breathing almost in sync, he is overcome by a powerful urge to tell her he loves her.

She knows, he thinks to himself.

When he wakes from a nightmare, of mud and spattered blood and bone fragments slipping between his fingers as he tried to staunch the soldier's wound, he's screaming, yelling, more words than he's uttered in months. He feels something squeeze him and his eyes pop open, looking down to see two slim, tan arms held tight to his chest, feels the rest of her body pressed against his back. Her breathing is fast too and he wonders if he's scared her, wants to roll over to check, to look in her eyes, to reassure her.

Instead he lets his body relax, lets her hold on him become a mere comfort rather than his only anchor to reality. 

When she opens the door that night, smelling of machine grease and the sweet dry grass of the end of summer, she smiles and runs her hand over the clean, folded laundry on the sofa. 

It's warm here on the second floor, so he wears only his suit pants and a white undershirt, carelessly tucked in.

There's a smudge of that grease on her neck, so he sets down his brandy and retrieves a cloth from the kitchen, watching her as he approaches. Never once does she flinch or question him. Instead she sighs at the touch of the cool wetness on her neck, his gentle swipes against her skin. 

In the dark of their room, the overhead fan just barely creaking, she reaches out and traces two fingertips down his back, their own way of saying goodnight. 

Rey wonders, at times, when she feels most alone here in the dark, if they will ever find their voices again.


End file.
